Top twelve IT skills

General

Spotted over on SysAdmin’s Diary, a reference to an article in Network World Asia entitled 12 IT skills that employers can’t say no to.
It’s an… interesting list:

  • Machine learning
  • Mobilizing applications
  • Wireless networking
  • Human-computer interface
  • Project management
  • General networking skills
  • Network convergence technicians
  • Open-source programming
  • Business intelligence systems
  • Embedded security
  • Digital home technology integration
  • .Net, C #, C ++, Java — with an edge

Good grief.
Sometimes you have to despair. Let’s take a slightly less naive gullible buzzword-friendly analysis-free look at that, shall we?

Machine learning
Not machine learning, the AI field with years of development and reseach, but how to construct SQL statements to extract data efficiently from large databases.
Mobilizing applications
WAP. And HTML for small screens. And common sense about how to do UI on small screens.
… Read the rest
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Mark Dennehy in 1 Comment

More on PHP5 adoption

PHP

Matthew Mullenweg isn’t terribly impressed with GoPHP5 or the php-internals people on the whole topic of dropping PHP4 and moving on to PHP5 and PHP6. Now, given that Matt’s the guy who founded WordPress, I reckon his opinion’s worth listening to, and given how much time I spend using vim, LaTeX and mutt, I know where he’s coming from; but he’s wrong in this instance, or at least, he’s looking at it the wrong way.

See, the difference between PHP4 and apps like LaTeX or vim is that, well, LaTeX is done. As in, it works, it’s bug-free (no, seriously, it’s as bug-free as it gets outside NASA, and a bit more so on occasion), and it does everything that its users require it to do, and well.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 2 Comments

Postgres performance

MySQLPostgres

For a long time now, most who’ve used both have felt that Postgres was a better database than MySQL, myself included. But until now, the stick that MySQL keep beating Postgres over the head with was performance. MySQL might be a toy database (okay, it’s moving away from that these days, but only in the last few versions and that’s not really enough dev time to be stable enough for critical stuff), but it was fast on cheap hardware, and for pragmatic web development, that meant it beat out Postgres every day of the week.

Not any more…

Basicly, for the first time in a seriouly major benchmark, postgres not only outperformed mysql, but it nearly matched oracle (which was running on hardware that cost more than twice as much).… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 2 Comments